Along similar lines, Demi from Zeppelin recaps all the great fundamental developments that have occurred in 2018 while prices crashed, laying the foundations for future growth.

Here's to his 2019 wishes coming through:

"While 2018 was more about trading, experimentation and laying out the initial infrastructure, 2019 will be more about solving problems for real users, deploying scalable and robust infrastructure, crafting great user experiences and driving sustainable businesses."

To top that up, the team at Dune Analytics churned some really good data on usage of the most popular Ethereum Dapps in 2018, from MakerDAO DAI to Compound lending, from 0x trading to Aragon DAO creation.

We are off to a good start, but still incredibly early in the grand scheme of things.

Would definitely love if they produced this sort of data on a regular basis in 2019.

The Multicoin team shared a list of all the open fundamental questions in crypto as we head into 2019. There's a lot, and some sound pretty obscure (eg "Is the “hardness” of money monotonically inversely correlated with hard forks?").

But it's an *awesome* and though-provoking read to reflect over during the holidays.

Really cool look at the completely incredible story playing out on Compound and its potential developments.

A quick recap is included, which is helpful:

"A large trader, who we will refer to as “LT”, sent 7% of the total REP supply to Compound as collateral for a large DAI loan. LT actually kept another 3% of REP’s total supply in a separate address, so in total LT controls over 10% of the REP supply. LT also appears to own over 1% of the supply of MKR tokens, and has a large Maker CDP open with about 1/1000th of the total ETH supply with a value over $8 million today. We know that LT used the DAI loan to purchase ETH which they added to their existing Maker CDP. In effect, LT used their REP tokens as collateral to increase their margin long position on ETH."

Wild speculation as to who it is is rampant as well - but the cool things are the potential liquidation scenarios outlined here.

For the developers or wannabes out there, this is a good starting point to venture out in the world of Solidity development.

💥Newsy stuff

- Zuck-coin. First leaks of what Facebook 40-strong blockchain team has been working on behind the scene: a stablecoin for the 200+ million Indian Whatsapp users to start with. Amazingly scary.

- Mergers. Picks & Shovel have merged with MG Stover crypto fund admin team Coinvantage to build together a "leading portfolio accounting and reporting system for digital assets". (PS we are investors in Picks & Shovel Co.)

- Coinbase news stream. We just can't keep up with Coinbase's news. This week it was: crypto-to-crypto trading (major news imho), a $5B asset move to a new infrastructure, support for DAI (which competes with its own stablecoin, interesting), a new forensics framework called Dexter, and the re-birth of Earn in a somewhat controversial launch with 0x giving away 1.6M tokens (around $560k) to Coinbase customers.

This is one of the projects that came out of ETHSingapore and it's very cool.

With some similarities to the Aztec Protocol, ZkDAI allows for transacting with DAI in a completely private way using ZK SNARKs, shielding sender, recipient and amount. It would be the closest thing to "on-chain cash" on Ethereum.

Spot is probably one of the most beautifully designed portfolio tracker app, one you'd be compelled to check daily despite your portfolio looking like dumpster fire...

The team have announced a $1.2M funding round led by Kima Ventures and a bunch of high profile angel investors. They already integrate with exchange APIs and allow importing of holdings via public Ethereum addresses, as well as having built their own pricing data feed. It will be interesting to see how much further down the stack they go, having started from the fairly commoditized portfolio tracking layer.

Speaking of pricing feeds, Nomics, who we've heard from multiple sources have one of the best crypto trading data APIs in the market, have closed a $3M Series A round led by Arthur Ventures and participated by Ben Davenport, CityBlock Capital, Coinbase Ventures, CoVenture Crypto and Digital Currency Group.

Abacus is building more infrastructure for the 'tokenization' of securities, with a platform to facilitate their issuance, administration and settlement on the blockchain, ultimately enabling secondary markets.